“How much more time do you need?”: Anthropological-Legal Reflections on the Impact of Chronopolitics for Asylum Seekers in Italy: Alasan’s Story

The last decade has witnessed an increasing proliferation of measures and strategies included in Italian and EU legislation to speed up the procedure for recognizing international protection, implicitly emptying it of its protective capacity. The contribution, part of ethnographic research that started in 2012 and is still in progress, intends to analyze how the use of time as a tool to govern contemporary migration flows acts differentially in terms of time spent, the time allowed, and time available, considering the different actors involved in determining its rhythm (Jacobsen and Karlsen, 2021; Della Puppa and Sanò in Studi Emigrazione, 220, 2020, in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 26(5), 503–527, 2021; Rozakou, 2021). The paper will be composed of two parts: in the first one, through the presentation of a life story, the impact on migrants’ experiences and emotional reactions to this unilateral determination of time dictated by policies and regulations will be problematized. The second part aims to examine the rationality of these procedures and assess their impact on the provisions in the broader legal framework. It seems interesting to investigate how control over time and through time (Tazzioli in Political Geography, 64, 13–22, 2018) is configured as a “specific modality of relations between parts of the world” (Fabian, 2021: 75), particularly how the “temporal architectures” (Sharma, 2014) enacted by Italy and the European Union have been codified in the law and governance policies of the current migration flow, and how migrants experience and endure these policies.